As a Bauhaus student, Philipp Tolziner had been involved in the construction of the Balcony houses at the Törten settlement in Dessau and the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau before he left to the Soviet Union. He survived incarceration in the Usollag labor camp in Solikamsk, near Perm in the Urals. He never left the Soviet Union, working in the Urals and later in Moscow on housing projects. With precarious means Tolziner copied and reproduced files, added authors, titles, years, and inventory numbers to his personal archive, creating a private Bauhaus archive in his Moscow flat. In 1996, he donated his archive to the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, where it is stored in the same way it was organized by Tolziner in Moscow.
With a new sculptural installation Alice Creischer references Philipp Tolziner’s early training as a wicker furniture maker, intimates the architect’s Bauhaus experience, and, through a series of texts that extend from the work, explores his proximity to communist ideals and his architectural responses.
